Chris Severe being interviewed by WZTV Fox 17 regarding his arrest for stalking country music star John Richvia YouTube

I realize this is my third post on this subject today, but I guess we haven’t found the bottom of this rabbit hole yet.

To catch you up, yesterday I wrote about zany anti-porn legislation (HB1185) which would have required that every internet-capable device in North Dakota be sold with content filtering installed on it. That post went viral, getting shared thousands of times, and the public reaction to the proposed bill wasn’t positive.

As a result the bill’s sponsor moved that it be removed from consideration this afternoon, something affirmed by a unanimous voice vote of the state House. As it happens a gentleman by the name of Chris Severe (how he spells it in his emails) or Sevier (how he spells it on his website) who is working to promote the legislation in a number of states was on the radio with me to talk about the legislation as it was being withdrawn.

This evening I can report that Mr. Sevier (that’s the spelling I’m going with) has, in an email to Klemin, threatened to file a federal lawsuit over the withdrawal of the legislation.

“If this is not remedied in a way I feel to be satisfactory, we will sue Fuse in Federal District Court,” Sevier continues.

A SAB reader who had emailed Rep. Klemin to protest the legislation found himself on a chain of emails between Severe and Klemin. You can read the full email chain below, with the last email coming from the reader (who asked that I protect his identity which I did with redactions) who alleges that Klemin shared his email with Sevier.

“In a radio interview, I was just asked what my reaction to you withdrawing the bill was, and my response was that you need to be voted out of office for not having back bone,” Sevier wrote in the email, apparently a reference to his interview with me. “This bill is about protecting women and children, and not pandering to shallow narratives for personal gain.”

“If this is not remedied in a way I feel to be satisfactory, we will sue Fuse in Federal District Court,” Sevier continues. “The sponsors that we have in all of the other states have backbone and are men of character and honor. This is weak and pathetic. The fact that we are working with the Federal Congress to pass a Federal bill means that the state of North Dakota will be regulated any way.”

I contacted Sevier via telephone this evening, and he confirmed the emails to me. He also said the “Fuse” he was talking about is the North Dakota based advocacy group (here’s their website). He also provided me with a second email chain (PDF) he had with Klemin and Fargo state Rep. Shannon Roers Jones who was a co-sponsor of the legislation.

In that chain, as in the one forwarded to me by a SAB reader, Klemin indicates a willingness to file this legislation again in 2019. Roers Jones indicates that, having been in office for just weeks, she wasn’t aware of what she was getting into with this bill.

Sevier, again, mentions federal litigation over the matter.

“Klemin is pissing in the well,” Severe told me.

“There were co-sponsors who agreed to sponsor the bill who immediately said they’d vote against the bill,” he continued. “It smelled of some sort of collusion.”

Sevier claims he and his group have worked with human trafficking groups in other states but “by far the worst that we’ve encountered is Fuse in North Dakota.”